


To Find That They Have Flown Away

by reine_des_corbeaux



Category: Die sechs Schwäne | The Six Swans
Genre: Future Fic, Gen, Memory, Music, Self-Esteem Issues, Starting Over
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-11
Updated: 2020-05-11
Packaged: 2021-03-03 04:49:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,696
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24119059
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/reine_des_corbeaux/pseuds/reine_des_corbeaux
Summary: Still swan-winged, the youngest brother tries to start his life afresh.
Comments: 14
Kudos: 15
Collections: Once Upon a Fic 2020





	To Find That They Have Flown Away

**Author's Note:**

  * For [M J Holyoke (wholeyolk)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wholeyolk/gifts).



The sea was up by afternoon, and the clouds hung low and heavy over the cliffs and the wild gray waves churning up foam like little flurries of lace or the feathers shaken out from a beaten goosedown mattress on a fine spring day. They tossed and roiled against the gray face of the cliffs, and he watched the waves with a certain sort of sadness in his dark eyes (and he had to remember they were dark and sad, and long-lashed like those of a creature of the land. He’d left his shrewd bird’s eyes with his lost bird-form). 

The ramparts beneath Yann’s hands were slick with moss and the mist that never seemed to leave the kingdom beside the sea, and the clouds obscured the horizon and the soft rise of all the islands dotting the coast. Islands, of course, that paid tribute to this little, petty land. Yann tried to like this country, and think of it as something besides a petty kingdom with a broken castle perched on a grey cliff above a grey village overlooking a grey sea. His father’s kingdom had been petty too-- a little town hugging the walls of a castle on a mountainside, hiding away from the eaves of the dark and endless forest pressing in on all sides. They weren’t grand people, though they sold timber to the Sea People and the Kindred in the Valley, and they sold their meager harvests to the Mountain Folk. Grandeur was a hunt, or a dress of red wool with an embroidered belt cinched up beneath the bosom. Grandeur was a copper cloak-pin and glass beads on an apron’s upper hem. A king’s family could have it, but so too could a tree-seller or an alewife, though their glass beads were often flawed, and they never wore such fine shoes. Yann had leather on his feet even during the harvest, and a cloak embroidered with starflowers and dragons, which he was only allowed to wear to feasts. 

He’d been planning to wear it in the evening when New-Mother brought them the little white shirts, worked well with her Forester hands, only the slightest hint of Kindred-style blackwork at the neck. Yann and his brothers had been all too eager to try on the new things, pretty and fine in their simplicity, and New-Mother coaxed the shirts over their heads, her red-apple smile full of promise and joy. That was all Yann remembered of New-Mother, really. Her pretty smile, and her calloused hands, and the way her eyes flashed sickly yellow for a moment as they put on the shirts. 

Then skin ripped and tore away, hairs melting and loosening into feathery down, bones cracking and melting in their need to move, and Yann’s world had gone white and still for a moment, his mind gashed with agony, white fire in his vision as the bones in his body cracked and reformed. And then it was over, and he was a swan, and when he spread his wings, the wind came up and under them, and soothed away the pain in his broken body and shattered mind. 

The rest was all a story for song and legend-- the caring sister, the fair young king, the wicked mother, and the stake of good, clean driftwood put up on a sleety day in the public square. Yora with mouth smeared with dark ink to show the crime she’d been condemned for, and the swans like angels falling from the sky when she threw the aster shirts over their shoulders. So many years ago, and still the pain burned white-hot and horrendous in Yann’s body, and he’d sunken into it, only to wake in the mud neither swan nor man. He’d been Yora’s favorite swan, and now he was only her monster, one wing flapping uselessly in the mire, the white feathers filthy. 

A swan down in the bay made a harsh, angry noise, jolting Yann from his reveries. It was a familiar call, but he couldn’t remember its meaning. The call slipped from his mind like words for an old prayer. It was there, just beyond him in the fog. It made his one wing tingle, all the feathers ruffling at once. 

Someone behind him cleared their throat, and Yann jumped, turning swiftly about to see who it was. Yora didn’t smile, not now and not ever, but she did nod her head at him in a way that might be construed as affectionate. He’d always found comfort in her presence, perhaps because she, like him, still seemed unused to this cold land and this new life. Her eyes were always shifty and haunted, even when her sons surrounded her and her husband stood at her side. 

“What are you doing?” she asked. “You’ll get cold.” 

“Just watching,” Yann replied. “I heard a swan out in the bay.” 

“It’s the time when they return,” Yora says. 

She wiped her hands on her apron, leaving dark, sticky smears. He didn’t know what she’s been doing, and he didn’t think he wanted to. Yora grew strange in their cursed confinement in the forest, stayed strange after her innocence was proved in her new homeland. The king liked it, Yann thought. A silent wife who mixed potions and embroiders strange faces onto the hems of her aprons might have been cause for alarm in some other kingdom, but here, the witch-queen from the forest was an object of curiosity. She did not kill her children, and she saved her brothers from another curse. For that, her people trusted her, even if she was strange and silent. 

Yann nodded at last in response to her. He searched for words, but could not think of anything to say that wouldn’t sound strange, ungrateful, or as if he missed the swans and his old and cursed shape. “Have they come from the islands or the woods?” 

“Some will go out to the islands. Some will stay. You should stay. Like the swans.” 

He would have wanted to stay, but the wind ruffled his feathers, and his heart ached sharply in his chest. He wanted to run, to fly, to soar away from this strange castle where he stayed only because he had nowhere else to go. No one would marry a man with one swan’s wing, and there were no lands for him to inherit. He had no position, and no useful skills. He couldn’t even fly. 

“You knew I wanted to leave?” Yann asked. 

“A sister knows. But you shouldn’t go. Who else can I talk to?” 

“You have a husband, and your sons.” 

“He likes it when I’m silent. And they’re afraid of me, just a little, I think. I don’t really look like a mother to them anymore. Maybe I never did.” 

The sea crashed below them. 

“If I were to leave,” Yann says at last, “where would I go?” 

“Far from here,” Yora says immediately. “In the outer islands they would kill you for your wing. Go to a city and throw yourself upon the mercy of the Lords of the Seven Valleys. They might take you in, if only to demonstrate the cruelties of magic and the strangeness of the world. You could be happy there. I have heard tell of a woman with the ears and claws of a cat who lived a happy life and found a husband among the Kindred of the Valley. You might find love there, if you wished to try for it. At the very least you’d earn a better living.” 

She reached out to touch the wing- he leaned into the touch, the delicate whisper of fingers on feathers and gentleness in every motion. In it, he felt her longing. Yora wanted him to stay, but she knew too that staying trapped people as much as it saved them. He’d been robbed of so much time, and now it was time for him to go. Understanding passed between them. 

“I’ll see you in the future,” he said at last. 

The next morning, Yann left at dawn, the swans’ cries still echoing in his ears. 

***

The road beneath his feet dwindled to a muddy path as he walked inland and away from the chalk-cliffs. By night, he reached the forest, grown very dark and very still. At Yann’s back, the sea-breezes still fluttered across the plains, but he took the path gratefully. The shadows of stiff, tall pines pooled at his feet, and he held a light in his good hand, his wing beneath his cloak. 

_If there are brigands,_ he thought, _I will not be able to defend myself_. The wing, shrouded in fabric, itched, and his eyes itched too under the cover of the trees. He pressed onward, and soon the lantern went out, leaving Yann only the light of the moon. Thinking of what Yora would have done, he walked until he came to a great oak tree, spreading its dark and lacy canopy over the forest floor. Since Yann could not climb, he sat instead, curled in the roots as if they were a nest. It was an inauspicious start to the journey but now, at last, he slept. 

The morning light was unfamiliar, and the forest was dark, and so Yann turned about as soon as he could in the day. He walked back along the pine-padded path until the trees thinned and he found himself on the peddler’s path out of the forest. It would be harder to find the Valley route across the cliff-plains, but it would be safer and more familiar. So Yann walked on in high spirits, hoping against hope that he might see another person on this second day, someone with whom he could share bread and wine and dried fish. But he didn’t see another person, and so instead he pushed back his cloak and let the wing out to breathe. 

It sparkled in the sunlight, slightly yellowy from poor cleaning, but all the same, unmistakably the wing of a swan. Yann let the wind play across his feathers, closing his eyes to the warmth of the sun. Like this, walking with his head tilted back and the little breezes all around him, he could remember that bottomless feeling of flight, the way the ground surged out from beneath you and the wind beneath two matching wings. With his wing outstretched, Yann walked until dark, and when he lay down beneath the stars, he curled it above his head. The wing, useless as it was, did help to keep the mist off. 

***

By the third day, Yann found himself without food, without shelter, and with a cold wind coming up over the cliffs from the sea. In the thick fog, he could hear the waves crashing wildly on the shore below, but he pressed on. The fog pressed in around him, obscuring his way. 

As night fell, the clouds remained and a driving rain began. Usually, Yann followed the stars to some hollow, and lay down, but there had not been storms before, and he had not had to hide his wing again beneath his cloak. But now he drew his wing above his head as a sort of shelter and pressed on. Certainly, he thought, he’d have found a house by now, some poor peasant eking out a living on the cliff’s edge. If he remembered from his flight, the cliffs dipped near this place, and there was a small fishing village of a few dozen houses, all casting their meager nets into the surrounding sea. 

But the village was too far, and the wing became waterlogged, and Yann couldn’t see for the sheets of rain that fell across his face and bowed down the grass across the cliffs. The ground beneath his feet was all mud, and his light went out, but still he pressed on. There was a golden glow not so far away, he thought, and maybe he could reach it if only he tried a little harder to do so. 

Even as he neared it, he felt his feet giving way beneath him, his legs finally too tired to move any further. Yann slumped to the ground, and reached out his hand and wing. They couldn’t reach it, and the wing was all afire with pain. He cried out, and then he sunk into the mud. 

_I should have stayed_ , Yann thought, and in the mist, he thought that he could see Yora, shaking her head. All her work, and she’d still lost a brother, even if he was only a half-swan monster. The rain fell harder, and it mixed with his tears, but he couldn’t bring himself to put a hand to his face and wipe the tears and water away. He closed his eyes. 

And then there were voices all around him, the sound of footsteps and the flash of lanterns, and people talking all at once. 

“Sir, sir, can you hear us, sir?” “Leave him, he’s got a wing.” 

“Still a man, Annet, still a man. He ought to be treated as one. We’ll take him in and see about supper.” 

Yann opened his eyes. There were two women and two men standing over him, cleanly but plainly dressed, identical expressions of worry on their faces. 

“Can you stand?” asked the woman who’d told Annet off. “Can you tell us your name?” 

“The wing hurts,” Yann said. “Please help me, but be gentle with it. And I’m called Yann.” The woman was careful as she eased him off the ground and into a standing position, though her touch did hurt a bit on his wing. 

“You’re a long way from nowhere, Yann,” she said. “I’m Eller, Annet over there’s the one with the cap, the men are Jor and Hanno. We run the inn, which you’re nearly at. Not many travellers come our way this early in the year.” 

“Thank you for finding me,” Yann said. 

“We heard your cries. Least we could do,” Eller said, shrugging. 

The inn, when they reached it was humble and small, with a lantern at the gate and a muddy inn-yard smelling of horse and of sea breeze. Eller guided him across it, Annet grousing beside her about witches and he-demons in the guise of swans, while Jor and Hanno joked in accents Yann could hardly understand. 

Inside, the room was firelit and comfortable, with a low fire and a few people scattered about in chairs and on benches, chatting and eating, one man strumming at a harp, playing out of tune. Eller sat Yann down near the fire. 

“Annet, fetch this man some bread and soup. He’s tired and cold. Yann, take off that wet cloak.” 

Yann did. His rescuers, meanwhile, blended back into the inn’s shadows, found their way back to scattered guests to chat, and only a few eyes flickered his way. The harper strummed again, and his strings sounded odd, a bit like swan-song. They conjured memories in Yann’s mind, of happier days and stranger nights, and a lodge in the forest where he’d lived before everything went wrong. Perhaps he missed song even more than he missed flying, missed the way his voice could soar as it danced through the notes of old folk songs. So, as he waited for his soup, he opened his mouth. 

At first, the words were quiet, some song of the forest he half-remembered from childhood, fit to the tune the harper played. But he raised his voice louder as the inn quieted, singing as best he could, remembering the old legend of the dying swan. Was this what this song was? He had met people, and they had not pushed him away. Instead, they welcomed him into their inn, were feeding him, and gave him a place by the fire. The world was cruel, but perhaps it was kindly too. And so, Yann sang, for the dying of an old swan-self, and the beginnings of a new life, here in this place or farther down the path. Happiness would come, and one day soon, he would stretch his wing in the sun and breathe in peace with the rising morning wind. 

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you enjoy this! I had a fun time writing it, and I deeply love the Younger Brother and therefore loved your prompts! 
> 
> Title from W.B. Yeats' "The Wild Swans at Coole."


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